Engineer met big challenges during oil career

Jun. 21—MIDLAND — Working for ExxonMobil for 17 years in Equatorial Guinea was a profound experience for industrial engineer Jeff Smith, who came to appreciate the tyrannized people of EG, as it's usually called, and to work overtime dealing with the government, which is often criticized by the U.S. Department of State and human rights groups.

Since oil was found off-shore there in the Gulf of Guinea in the mid-1990s, the Central West African nation has been a bonanza for President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his relatives and friends, but those riches have not done much to improve the lives of its 1.4 million citizens. EG produces about 300,000 barrels of oil a day.

Smith worked in Qatar and Venezuela before going to EG in 2000, so working rotationally in a foreign country was not in most respects a new thing. "We had an independent drilling contractor found with a pistol in his luggage at the airport and after quite a bit of discussion he ended up going to the Black Beach Prison," he said, referring to one of the most infamous prisons in the world, where Obiang was the director before assuming the presidency in a 1979 coup d'etat and having his uncle executed.

"Working through the American Embassy, we finally got the contractor released after two weeks with the embassy providing him food, bedsheets and a pillow. He was told to go straight to the airport and leave the country. No one is allowed to have firearms there except the military and police.

"You also can't have a camera or take photos. If the military sees you with a camera, they will take it."

Smith is a native of San Antonio who graduated from Texas A&M and worked for Marathon Petroleum for 10 1/2 years before joining Mobil, which had yet to merge with Exxon. He and his wife Rae have two children and four grandchildren.

Smith had worked in ExxonMobil's environmental, safety and regulatory departments in West Texas and New Mexico and his duties expanded in EG, where he was involved in drilling, operating, maintenance, safety, environmental, emergency preparedness and security with advisors who secured the company's compound on the island of Bioko 30 miles off shore. Smith also helped maintain relations with EG officials who asked questions about the company's operations.

"I had to explain a lot to them," he said. "When I first went there, the minister I was dealing with didn't like me because I was new and different. But after a while, we developed a good working relationship."

Noting that ExxonMobil has trained and employs 600 local citizens, Smith said the government often arrested and jailed people for obscure reasons. "The other thing was that some of our workers had deeds to land and built small houses, but the government would just come along and confiscate their property and not compensate them, so they had to find other places to live," he said.

"Their judicial system is not as formal as ours by any means. There are very few lawyers."

In a recent report, the State Department cited "significant human rights issues including credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extra-judicial killings, by the government and torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by the government.

"There are arbitrary arrests or detentions, political prisoners or detainees, serious problems with the independence of the judiciary, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy and serious restrictions on free expression and media including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests and prosecutions of journalists, censorship and serious restrictions on internet freedom," the State Department said.

Independent from Spain since 1968, the official language in Equatorial Guinea (pronounced Gi-NAY) is Spanish, although many citizens speak French or English. Represented by its upstream affiliate, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., or MEGI, ExxonMobil has 40 wells producing 6,000 to 10,000 barrels of oil per day in 500 to 1,800 feet of water while Marathon exports liquefied natural gas 40 miles north of there.

"The U.S. closed the embassy when former President Clinton was in power, but it was reopened under President Bush, which helped a lot with education and living conditions," Smith said. "I developed a healthy respect for the local people and I still get emails and calls from some of them.

"They are very family oriented and some have gotten high-level jobs with the company, which has built parks, drilled fresh water wells, refurbished schools and provided books to the students."

Asked his view of the energy policies of the Biden administration, Smith said, "I think President Biden needs to realize that electricity is generated from natural gas or coal.

"We will be without electricity if he shuts down the industry, so he needs to understand what is going on in the real world."

Smith said America's transition to electric vehicles should be planned as an orderly progression over a period of time and that powering 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs with batteries is a very daunting prospect. "Monumental technology has to be developed for them to be able to do what they do now," he said.